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Male Uiim Iroi tlie Pliysioloiical StaipM, 



A PAPER READ BEFORK THE 



Butler County Medical Society, 



HAMILTON, OHIO, OCTOBER i, 1885, 



By dr. dan MILLIKIN. 



INFANTILE PEDAGOGY FROM THE 
PHYSIOLOGICAL STANDPOINT. 



By dr. dan MILLIKIN. 



The little children in the two or three lowest grades of our public 
schools are little more than infants, and to me it seems only fair that 
we should lay down for them some special principles of pedagogy, 
such as a physiologist might approve. They differ very much from 
older children, and on that account they demand some special study. 
The little creatures have one mental peculiarity which strongly at- 
tracts my attention as I begin this discussion, and that is a result of 
the fact that they begin their intellectual life simply by perceiving, 
or simply by the passive reception of sensations, and only slowly and 
tardily do they come to have some power of active, independent 
thought. It is by such means that they learn their first lessons of 
experience, and this mode of learning continues to be dominant for 
years. I think, then, that, as a physiologist, seeking always the nor- 
mal, which is the natural mode of activity, I do not speak extrava- 
gantly when I say that the perceptive powers should be chiefly used, 
and chiefly appealed to, in the early, infantile, and puerile years. If 
this is the natural method of learnmg in these tender years, the argu- 
ment might rest at this point of my discourse ; for, what better can 
we do than to keep close to nature in such a matter .-' 

Have we any anatomical explanation of the difference between the 
intellection of young children and that of older persons .-' There is 
a very clear structural difference that has been pointed out by Jacobi 
and others : The cerebrum of the young child contains, relatively, a 
great deal of water, and the cerebellum contains relatively little. 
The cerebrum is comparatively soft, pulpy, and, as one may rightly 
argue, is inefficient. The cerebrum of infancy is not yet ready for 
the highest activity ; the cerebellum is ready. 

1 Read before the Butler County Medical Society, at Hamilton, Ohio, October i, 1885. 



(4) 

Aside from this difference of histological structure, there is a 
marked peculiarity in the coarse anatomy of the infantile and puerile 
brain that argues its functional inefficiency. The cerebrum of these 
small fry conforms closely to that of mammals inferior to man. It 
is like the cerebrum of an ape, and, in some regards, it is like the 
cerebrum of a dog, or of some mammal of that order of perfection. 
Owing to the great amount of water in the infantile cerebrum, its 
tissues are very soft. Its convolutions are not deep, nor are they 
tortuous in their pattern as in the adult brain. The important dis- 
tinction between the white and gray matter is not well marked. The 
ventricles are smooth. We know that these characters which the 
baby's brain conspicuously lacks are the qualities which belong pre- 
eminently to the thinking animals, and belong in their most exagger- 
ated degree to those animals that think the most. What, then, is the 
inference as to the baby's intellectual performances ? 

Or, not confining our studies to the brain alone, take another fact 
as to the infantile nervous system. Says Jacobi : " In the child the 
peripheric nerves are comparatively larger than the centres, — the 
sympathetic ganglia being the only exceptions to this rule. The 
spinal cord predominates over the brain, the centres of motion and 
circulation in the anterior horns over those of sensation, and there- 
fore we find more vascular and reflex function, and less intellectual 
capacity. The former are the direct results of early and complete 
development ; the latter requires time for growth." 

Or, recapitulating this and the last statement, the lower, inferior, 
strictly animal parts of the nervous system preponderate in infancy ; 
the nerves are disproportionately large as compared with the nerve- 
centres ; the anterior horns of the spinal cord preponderate over the 
posterior ; the cord itself is proportionately larger than the brain ; 
and, in the brain, the cerebellum preponderates over the more intel- 
lectual cerebrum. 

Now where does this anatomical study lead us .-* Does it not lead 
us to the educational system of Froebel, the kindergartner .'* Within 
the kindergarten we notice, first, that the teacher is pursuing a nat- 
ural and physiological method. The children in that school are chil- 
dren. Mental fatigue is out of the question, and, for that reason 
alone, the system is commendable from the physiological standpoint. 

And then the character of the work — see how well it conforms to 
what we know of the anatomy and physiology of the infantile nervous 
system ! The perceptive powers are continually exercised, and pos- 
sibly, in some cases and to some small extent, they are stimulated. 
The study is of forms, and of colors, and patterns, and trades of men, 



%4 



(5) 

and the habits of animals. The school is dealing with things, not 
with the abstractions which to us older people are the real entities, 
but which are an affliction to the little ones. We have seen that the 
child's brain is unfit for any intellectual work of the highest sort. 
In accordance with this inexorable fact, the system of Froebel for- 
bids anything like sustained ratiocination. I declare it to be, there- 
fore, a natural and physiological method. 

The infantile brain is not adapted, and cannot be adapted, to pro- 
longed effort of any kind, and in the kindergarten this is a principle 
carefully regarded, for there the exercises are always short, and are 
frequently varied. The burdens laid upon the pulpy and undeveloped 
brain, overbalanced as it is by the other parts of the nervous sys- 
tem, are very light. 

The kindergarten finds a physiological justification in this also. 
The work is incessantly broken and varied not only by the greatest 
variety of pursuits, so that the baby mind in its natural fickleness 
may not be exhausted, but also by physical exercises, marches, songs, 
pantomimes, and the like. So, while the system yields philosoph- 
ically to the childish disposition to incessant motion, it yet guides and 
controls that motion to the extent of making it harmonious. In this 
is involved the idea of law and order and rhythm, and you who have 
looked into the matter carefully and patiently will agree that, while 
we cannot suppress the motion of children with safety, we can do the 
next best thing, ^- we can fix their attention on their bodily move- 
ments, and safely begin, at the most tender years, to bring their little 
muscles under the control of their little wills, inducing that har- 
monious action which we might command, but would command 
in vain. 

And now permit a little digression from the taught to the teachers. 
While I am fully convinced that the first grade of our common 
schools should be a kindergarten, I am equally convinced that the 
kindergarten should be the earliest school for teachers. If t were 
the autocrat of the universe (and every one is pleased to imagine 
himself such), I would ask each candidate for a teacher's position : 
" Where, and when, and with what success did you teach a kinder, 
garten.^" The candidate not making a satisfactory answer to this 
question should be dismissed with a very emphatic recommendation 
to come no more until evidence could be brought that the principles 
of Froebel had been mastered. If so disposed, the despot might 
give reasons for his conduct. He might answer and say that the kin- 
dergarten is of value to discourage and eliminate those who, by some 
unfortunate defect of constitution, were unfit to teach. The teacher 



(6) 

possessed of the idea that the teacher's first duty is to " preserve 
order," as it is called in the cant of the schools, would be quickly- 
disposed of by a course in the kindergarten where the orderly dis- 
order prevails. The teacher who thinks, and by some vice of consti- 
tution is obliged to think, that his chief function is to pump knowl- 
edge into children, would soon be discouraged in the kindergarten ; 
for this cramming process is not to be thought of in the kinder- 
garten. Those who are endowed with the shrewish gift of scolding 
would soon drop out of sight, — for, in the kindergarten, as at home, 
this is the abomination of desolation. Among male candidates for 
teachers' positions, the weeding would be most notable in the case of 
those who have the cruel Napoleonic lust for power ; for to them the 
kindergarten would seem to be the very crowning bloom of nonsense. 
Within its walls the principle of self-government is in full activity, 
and the teacher is little more than the president of the republic. 

Besides being a sieve, to eliminate incompetent teachers and those 
who have not the special gifts to adapt them to the office of teacher, 
the kindergarten has the merit of being the best possible school for 
teachers. It is in the kindergarten that teachers may learn what 
they so hardly learn elsewhere, that children are not, as they are so 
often called, so much plastic material to be stamped and pressed into 
immutable molds ; but that they are living things, with immutable 
laws of development, to which the molds must be adapted by the 
wise, adroit, and alert teacher. A course in the kindergarten, if any- 
thing, I should hope, would strip the teachers of the foolish notion 
that children may be made into good or bad scholars, and would de- 
velop the idea that they may be made to grow in good or bad direc- 
tions. It is in the kindergarten, I should hope, that teachers might 
be converted from the prevalent idea that they are manufacturers ; 
that the school is a factory ; that the pupils are the raw material ; 
that the graduates are the finished product. The methods of the 
kindergarten are not the methods of the artisan, — they are the 
methods of the horticulturist. 

But, aside from all these questions, which are not strictly physio- 
logical, there is one peculiarity of the kindergarten for which I would 
plead with ten times my poor ability. I mean that it prescribes short 
hours for short children. 

For us to open the argument, is a concession. The man who pro- 
poses to keep little children in the school-room for many hours in 
each day is the man who should assume the omis p rob audi. To place 
a small child in a crowded school-room is a procedure so artificial, so 
deleterious, upon the very first aspect of the case, that there can 



(7) 

hardly be any debate, pro and contra, until some reason for such a 
course is brought forward. But let us waive all this, and attempt to 
prove a negative. 

We have already noted the difference between the infantile or 
puerile brain and the adult brain, and from this have inferred that 
the little child is not fit to perform the sort or the amount of work 
that is easily possible for an older child approaching maturity. Now 
turn from their brains to their bodies, and find them so different from 
ours that another argument is presented for shortening their hours 
of labor in school. Little children have, in fact, something to do 
besides doing a full stint of work in school. Their vital powers need 
to be exerted in other directions. They must accomplish so much in 
the way of growth and in the building up of new cells that we, who 
have merely to maintain the nutrition of cells already built up, should 
blush to set them tasks that would be great enough for mature, har- 
dened brains and bodies. 

Reflect a moment on the enormous rapidity of their growth in the 
early years of life. Scliadow says that a child destined to attain the 
height of sixty-six inches will come into the world eighteen inches 
in length. In the first year the little fellow, if healthy, will grow 
about ten inches. In the second year it will grow four inches, and 
nearly, or quite, as much in the third year. In the fourth year it 
will grow three inches, or a little more. In the fifth year it will grow 
three inches, or a little less. In the sixth year it will grow two 
inches. In the next four years, carrying the child to the age of ten 
years, it will grow about an inch per annum. During these last four 
years, when the longitude of the child is increasing somewhat more 
slowly, the latitude is increasing very rapidly, so that the child ceases 
to be slender, and, oftentimes, seems to take on something of the 
outlines that belong to maturity. During these same four years, 
when the extremely rapid growth in length has somewhat diminished, 
the eruption of the six-year molars is completed, and is followed by 
the eruption of a number of the permanent teeth ; and, in these same 
years, the child passes from a state of absolute dependence to one of 
comparative independence ; and this means, as you will admit, a try- 
ing revolution in the whole moral and mental nature. These last 
four years before ten are years of enormously rapid growth, and of 
the evolution of new faculties and powers. Is it proper that the 
child should be, in any sense or to any degree, forced in its studies 
at such times .-' 

But let us come to figures. The question continually presents it- 
self, How much can the average child stiuly ? Before we answer it 
let us ask another : How much can the average young man study } 



(8) 

" At West Point Military Academy," says Dr. Loring, " every- 
thing is in favor of the utmost efificiency. The pupils are picked 
young men, just past boyhood. They are excluded from dissipa- 
tion and from general society ; and their active bodily exercises, 
their regular diet and sleep, and the healthful climate of the place, 
leave nothing to be desired. The daily time assigned to study and 
recitations is about ten hours a day during the six cold months." 
"At the Massachusetts Agricultural College the actual work amounts 
to nearly ten hours, daily, besides six and one-fourth hours of mili- 
tary drill and farm-work, weekly." 

I consider this to indicate the proper amount of study and recita- 
tion for mature, hearty, ambitious young men, who, at college, at 
least, are anxious to crowd a few yeg.rs with the greatest possible 
amount of work ; and who, oftentimes, have good reasons, financial 
or otherwise, to strain their powers a little. In making comparisons 
we should not forget that study at college is usually accomplished 
under circumstances that permit far more freedom of motion, and far 
more freedom of choice among studies, than there ever can be granted 
to the child in the school-room. 

For young people fit for the high school, between the years of 
twelve and eighteen years, ten hours a day of study is not to be 
thought of. If all the hours of study and of recitation, at school 
and at heme, foot up seven or eight hours, it is enough. The child 
that cannot make progress in these hours cannot make progress at 
all. More than those seven or eight hours will simply overtax the 
immature brains of the lads and lasses, and will inevitably lead to 
dullness in routine work, and absolute dullness and failure when it 
comes to original, creative work. 

Below the age when puberty is impending and when a certain de- 
gree of maturity has arrived, what shall be said of the hours of study ? 
The hours of school should be continually diminished in proportion 
to the immaturity of the little ones. If the first year of school were 
a year of kindergarten (and from the bottom of my heart I wish it 
were), children of six years, or even of five years, might safely be 
kept at their play-work for three hours daily. If the first year of 
school is to be our ordinary school-year, the children ought not, by 
any means, to go to school for more than three hours, and it should 
be forbidden to send children to school under the age of six and a 
half years. 

The other young innocents, a little older than the youngest, — that 
is to say, between the ages of eight and ten years, — ought not, by Siuy 
means, to be confined to the school-room more than three and a half 
or four hours. 



(9) 

What would be the results ? A short time ago my own little boy 
was an attendant at a kindergarten, in his sixth year, and it was my 
intention to take him out of the kindergarten after the expiration of 
one year, and place him in the lowest class in the public schools. 
But, upon the promise of his kindergarten teacher to procure a.n 
assistant, and put him through the same course of instruction that 
prevailed in the public schools, I consented to leave the little fellow 
in the kindergarten through the second year. When the third year 
arrived, I sent him to take his place in the second yeair's grade in the 
public schools, with many misgivings whether he could keep his 
place, and with regrets that he had not found his place by entering 
the lowest grade the year before, according to my first plan. He had 
five little companions, similarly educated in the kindergarten, and 
transplanted at the same time into the public schools. Within a few 
days, the fact leaked out that all these six children were remarkably 
proficient in the studies of their new class, and, indeed, it was 
seriously proposed to promote some of them at once to the third 
year's grade in the schools. It should be recorded that they were not 
preternaturally bright children, and that their teacher was at that 
time only a novice, though she has since shown that she had the es- 
sential gifts of a teacher by her work in the public schools. 

By what amount of study was this result brought about ? This 
little group of six children only attended the kindergarten for the 
three hours of the ordinary morning session. Part of that three 
hours was taken up with the safe stowing of a lunch, and with a run 
out of doors in favorable weather. The singing, marching, and strict 
kindergarten work occupied so much of the remainder of the morn- 
ing that these little pupils of the advanced class only attended to 
their reading, writing, spelling, and arithmetic for forty minutes each 
day. They were at that time competing, as you will remember, with 
children in the public schools, who (poor little souls !) were com- 
pelled to attend school more than four hours each day. These latter 
sufferers addressed themselves strictly to academic work from the 
start, without* any kindergarten nonsense ; and yet, in the year's race, 
the children who worked four hours a day, under the tuition of an 
experienced teacher, were ' fairly beaten by the children who worked 
forty minutes a day under the tuition of an inexperienced teacher ! 

In England the attempt has been made to educate the children of 
the working classes on what is known as the " half-time " system. 
Upon this admirable plan, children who are by stringent laws forbid- 
den to work in the factories are permitted to work half the day, on 
condition that they go to school the other half. Under these circum- 



(lO) 

stances it has been found that the progress of the half-time scholars 
is quite as rapid as that of children who attend longer daily sessions 
of schools. Duly considering the coarse material that is furnished 
these schools, and duly measuring the results, it is fair to say that 
nothing better than the half-time system could be devised for all the 
children in England. 

The argument is strengthened by the great success of night 
schools, — a success that is out of all proportion to the time em- 
ployed. 

The question of how much time children should spend in school is 
much simplified for me by a firm conviction that children of well-to- 
do parents should not study in school at all. They should ordinarily 
study at home, and there, with their other lessons, should learn the 
most precious lesson of all, — the lesson of self-control. They 
should come to school with the results of study. They should come 
to recite, to read aloud, to write, to hear lectures and see demonstra- 
tions. I know right well that there are children with crowded, noisy, 
or disorderly homes for whom this plan will not answer. These 
children positively need the quiet of the school-room for the prepara- 
tion of lessons. There are other scholars who possibly cannot study 
without the support and control of the teacher. But it is eminently 
desirable that recitations should be so arranged that those who choose 
to do so may go away early in the day, leaving the more breathing 
space, and the greater quiet, for those who may need to remain at 
school for study. 

And in that phrase, "breathing space," is found a good reason for 
short hours at school. The air of school- rooms is bad, and always 
must be. It is particularly bad in school-rooms where little children 
are congregated. The best that money and skill can do is to make 
it not too bad. It is not in the books, but it is true, that little chil- 
dren need as much air as adults. In the first place, they are not so 
cleanly as adults. Witness the odor of a room where little children 
are assembled. Upon inquiry, I find that little children are not 
bathed even once a week, in cool weather, as a rule. In many fami- 
lies where there is a scrupulous cleanliness as to the house and rai- 
ment, the little children are not bathed through the entire winter, 
save when they are visibly dirty. In many families, where we would 
expect better practices, there is so much boasting of the weekly bath 
for little children that I know the bath is regarded as a very heroic 
performance, not free from a very delightful spice of danger. Then, 
in the second place, children need as much free air as do adults, be- 
cause they have such swift vital processes going on within their little 



(11) 

bodies, and such a great amount of excretory matter loading the ex- 
pired air. In the third place, they need as much fresh air as adults, 
because they have, notoriously, very poor powers of resistance to foul 
air. 

I, therefore, set it down as a fact that children, however small, 
need one thousand cubic feet of air-space, within which space the air 
should be wholly changed thrice in an hour. This allowance of space 
and air they will not get in school. To the end of time, they will be 
closely packed, because they are small. For this reason the air-space 
will be always less than a thousand feet per pupil. Even if, under 
exceptional circumstances, the little children have a sufficient amount 
of space, the changing of the air will permit the escape of costly hot 
air, and, at the same time, the influx of a quantity of disagreeable 
cold air ; and so, from motives of economy and comfort, the children 
will not have the one-fourth part of three thousand cubic feet of fresh 
air per hour. Aside from all considerations of cerebral, or bodily, or 
intellectual development, here is a good reason for getting children 
out of the school-room as quickly as possible, and for keeping them 
out. 

The sins against physiological laws that I have pointed out, — foul 
air, long hours, adult work for infantile brains, — all of this must in- 
duce weariness and disgust in the little fellows. Upon this grows 
indifference, absenteeism, truancy, and, last and worst of all, invalid- 
ism. When a child, weary of school, has been long kept out of 
school, on account of vague, incurable, and nameless maladies, which 
it shrewdly pretends to have ; and more especially when it becomes 
prematurely an honest hypochondriac, no more pitiful wreck can be 
conceived, nor is there any patient more trying to the poor doctors, 
nor is there any spectacle more disgraceful to the accumulated wis- 
dom of this educating, educated, nineteenth century. 



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